Wieso die Modellbahnbranche in Schwierigkeiten steckt

In the Eisenbahnkurier, a german railroad magazine, there is a low-volume discussion about why there are too little new people interested in model railroads. Everybody agrees about the general problem, which is that too little young people and children enter the hobby and stay there. The question remains: Why? As a more or less young person who is interested in model railroads, I thought I’d offer my point of view about this as well.

My model railroad is a small N layout without landscape that I rebuild rather often.

Possible reasons given include old favorites like “The youth of today is at fault” or “The railroads of today are the problem”. I’d say there’s a variety of overlapping reasons.

The youth isn’t all that different

You often hear things like “The youth of today sits in front of the TV and computer all day and has too little imagination, patience, etc”. That is, if I may be frank, nonsense.

Video games and movies are always presented in odd fantasy worlds. The amount of people who are creative and show this of [on][ff] [the][devart] [internet][youtube] is only growing. Patiently creating new worlds hasn’t lost any of it’s appeal when you look at things like The Sims, or people who create [new maps for their favorite video games][is82maps].

So I’m simply going to say here: Not our fault, it’s yours.

Railroads stopped being cool

There are lots of interesting trains, but marketing of them is not as good as it could be.

Public interest in trains is rather low, all things considered. Other subjects like computers, cars, planes etc. are generally considered more interesting. Let’s be honest, how many other railroad freaks do you know?

Is it the fault of railroad companies, is it technological progress, or something else? No idea. But I do have to say that the model railroad industry isn’t doing anything to change that.

Model railroads aren’t present

Finding model railroads in normal toy stores is somewhere between difficult and impossible. When you do find something, it’s usually restricted to a very, very restricted amount of shelf space, and it’s getting less over the years.

You also hardly find advertisement for model railroads outside the classic railroad magazines. I think that…

Model railroad producers aren’t interested in young customers

The largest part of model railroads made and sold in Germany is from NEM Epoch III. This represents the time from the end of the second world war until 1968 (1970 in the former GDR), and has steam engines as well as a few early electrics and diesels. It’s the time when most of the current model railroaders were children, and is consequently shown as the “good old days”. All houses you find are from the black forests, and alcoholics are portrayed as happy pub-goers. Modern times, referred to as Epoch V, have their share of the market, but it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as one would like.

At the same time, there is a different but related problem.

Model railroads are too expensive

Fun fact: A normal engine costs slightly less than an Xbox 360, while a High-Speed EMU costs slightly more.

A long-time favorite of mine. These days, playing with model railroads is just too pain expensive. A new video game costs about 50 €. I think that the price for a new locomotive for a model railroad should be the same. I am fully willing to accept that it has the wrong type of radiator for the kind of motor shown or something like that. A locomotive costing as much as a graphics card or a modern game console is just too expensive.

The way it actually is these days is that a locomotive for 100 € is considered very cheap, and really cheap offers are just plain and simple crap, with windows that are just printed on the body (and through which you obviously can’t look through) and the likes. It is possible to do this right, as [Piko][pikott] shows us. I, myself, mainly use american model railroads, which are cheap because of the dollar.

Conclusion

The model railroad industry has no idea at all how to stand against the modern competition, or if they do have a concept they are doing their best to not let it show. Instead of doing something you hear a lot of complaining, and maybe the odd cheap starter set, but no real line of products. There are good ideas, as Piko and [Märklin][maerk] show, but as long as most manufacturers still think that some odd steam engine nobody has heard of for 500 € is the thing we all need, model railroads won’t be able to get their old stance back.

Written on May 16th, 2008 at 06:58 pm

0 Comments

    New comments can no longer be posted because it got to annoying to fight all the spam.